Well, maybe not quite perfection. After all, Simmons isn’t a cat dorm, so you wouldn’t find any furry friends (besides Kaito, the Heads of House’s dog) roaming the hallways. But we have plenty of cool stuff to make up for that loss! Like our famous ball pit and Gymmons, our–

:o

Wait a second.

…

Oh.

My.

Goodness.

…

Could it be? A living, breathing kitty cat in front of me? IN SIMMONS HALL?

Cat!

Omg, omg, yes, yes yes yesyesyes!!! My prayers have finally been answered – Simmons has a cat now! (And what a beautiful cat he is, might I add.)

Pspspspsps, come here, kitty!

What a soft boy

Oh my! He’s such a sweet little angel! And so friendly too! Could this day get any better?

…

Oh wait, silly me – I forgot to introduce myself! Hey there, little guy. I’m Andi. What’s your name?

No thoughts, head empty

Not one for words, huh? That’s okay. I think I saw a sign with your picture on the way in. Let’s see…

Wow, he’s a peer mentor too? He’s certainly making me feel at home in Simmons :D

Well, that’s certainly a unique name, but I like it! Great to meet you, Skateboard!

Welcome to Simmons Hall, Skateboard, and I hope you have a great fall semester! Mine is already off to a great start :D

(Shoutout to Temkin ‘26 for letting me meet, photograph, and post about Skateboard! Without him, this post would not be possible.)

(Also, did you know Simmons will have not just one but six cats⁠01 Actually there are probably more, but I only know of these ones for now this semester? It truly is the best place to live on campus.)

Edit: My inbox is blowing up right now with angry messages demanding that I also introduce some other Simmons cats. Without further ado, meet:

Yuri! (Apparently, he only understands Spanish)

Dumpling! (The “void bringer”)

Nine-fold Pinwheel

Designer: I forgot (and can’t find the model online)

I started folding origami in high school because of a book I’d found in the school library. It contained a variety of fun models, from the traditional orizuru (paper crane) to Christmas ornaments. I was amazed by how the satisfyingly geometric creases gave rise to complex 3D shapes, and I immediately fell in love with the art.

Despite only having nine folds, I found this model the most challenging in the entire book (mostly because the instructions were rather vague), but it’s super satisfying to fold once you figure out how it works.

Five Intersecting Tetrahedra

Designer: Thomas Hull

The origami I folded in high school is what most people would associate with the art – following step-by-step folding instructions on a single sheet of paper. But when I came to MIT, I discovered that origami encompasses so much more than that. During my first winter break at MIT, I started folding modular origami – origami composed of many simple “modules” linked together to form a larger, more intricate structure.

The Five Intersecting Tetrahedra (FIT) is one of my favourite examples of modular origami because it’s both fun to assemble and visually striking. I made this one out of sticky notes at work!

Excavated Icosahedron

Designer: Unknown

Here’s another piece of modular origami I made out of sticky notes. Although not as visually striking or fun to assemble as its cousin (the FIT), this model is actually two models in one – it’s possible to the spikes to stick outward!

(I had a few sticky notes left over from this one, so I also made a tiny crane and a lotus.)

Unicorn

Designer: Tetsuya Gotani

After folding more spiky origami balls in my freshman year than I’m willing to admit, I decided to start learning how to design my own origami. Luckily, MIT was the perfect place for that. Not only is there a class about algorithmic origami design here, but there’s also an origami club (OrigaMIT) led by world-class origami designers. (You should check out their creations here and here; they’re truly incredible.)

Andy D. from OrigaMIT was nice enough to lend me a book of more advanced origami models, which I slowly worked through in my sophomore year. This unicorn is one of my favourites from that book because the end product looks so cool.

Cardinal

Designer: Robert Lang

I folded this cardinal from a crease pattern – a single image showing a model’s creases when unfolded but without specific steps for getting to the final product. Learning to interpret and work from them was a big step for me in my origami design journey, and this cardinal was one of the first origami models I folded purely from a crease pattern. A big upgrade from the only other bird I knew how to fold (the crane), if you ask me.

Dragon

Designer: Jo Nakashima

Sixteen Intersecting Triangles

Designer: Byriah Loper

I just can’t seem to resist folding modular origami. Something about the precise geometry and intricate weaving just really appeals to me as an engineer. I learned to fold this specific model from a book owned by one of my previous professors at MIT.

Flower Motif B

Designer: Tetsuya Gotani

This is another model from the book lent to me. Despite being a relatively simple 2D shape, it was surprisingly complex and required 38 folding steps!

Hydrangea

Designer: Shuzo Fujimoto

I originally planned to release this blog post way earlier this summer, but it’s now the last day of my internship, and I’m preparing to fly home tomorrow. Thankfully, I don’t need to abandon my origami creations at my desk this summer. On Monday, I put all these pieces up for “adoption” in my company’s Slack. And I’m pleased to say they’ve all found new, loving homes!

The industrial revolution and its consequences…

If you were lucky enough to be blissfully unaware of Bevi’s existence, prepare to have your day ruined as I tell you all about it. Bevi is a “smart” water “dispenser” company started at MIT. I put “smart” in quotation marks because Bevi machines stop working as soon as the WiFi goes out ( which happens at MIT more than I’m proud to admit⁠02 Ironically, most often in computer-science classes because there are so many people in them. ), and I also put “dispenser” in quotation marks because the machines are

So.

Unbearably.

Slow.

That I always end up contemplating what went wrong in the past few minutes for me to have the misfortune of using a Bevi machine. (The reason is usually that the other water dispenser on my floor in the office is, against all odds, worse than the Bevi machine. The sensor doesn’t quite work, so I always feel like Velma from Scooby-Doo fumbling around for her glasses when I try pouring myself a drink using it.)

I could go on for hours ranting about how much I despise Bevi… but this post isn’t about that. I want the MIT Admissions Blogs to remain a platform for positivity, so here’s a story about the one time when Bevi brought a glimmer of joy into my life.

But first, I need to give you more background about how Bevi works. If you’ve used a Bevi machine after July 2020, you’ve likely noticed the random QR code that appears on the touchscreen interface. Scan it, and it’ll direct you to a “mobile dispense” webpage where you can control the machine remotely using your phone.

The feature was probably implemented as some kind of COVID-prevention measure, but my first impressions from last summer were more along the lines of “Woah, I can dispense water from two feet away now instead of just one foot away! Thanks, big tech – you always know exactly what I need.”

And so, my opinion of Bevi remained that way until one fateful night this summer when I was on a call with some friends.

My friends on that call are interning in San Francisco this summer, so we were busy comparing the differences in office amenities between the East and West Coasts. As usual, I was complaining about how Bevi was literally ruining my life for real.

Suddenly, a crazy idea struck me.

“Hey Steven,” I said as I held my phone up against the screen of a nearby Bevi machine, “Can you try scanning this QR code, please?”

I was fully expecting the machine to freak out and passive-aggressively tell me to get better at dispensing water, but to our surprise, the QR code lit up green and morphed into a circle. “Mobile connected”, the screen read as Steven was presented with a phone menu for choosing flavour options.

I was too stunned to say anything, but Steven wasted no time pouring me an ice-cold cup of sparkling lime-mango water from San Francisco, over 2500 miles away.

It was a truly magical feeling, and I think you really need to experience it first-hand to understand how I felt at that moment. It was a bit like that famous scene from Tarzan where Tarzan and Jane first touched hands (only if Jane was still in Europe and Tarzan in Africa).

From that day on, I’ve had a newfound respect for Bevi. Not that I don’t intensely dislike it anymore, don’t get me wrong, but rather that Bevi is more than just a glorified kitchen faucet to me now.

… all this unhinged ranting to say that this blog post and the water in my bottle were (as Petey aptly puts it at the end of his emails):

Sent by the magic of mobile technology

I just sat there and shook my head in silence.

“No? What about a publication in a peer-reviewed journal? Or at least a patent? I know MIT kids like you love inventing cool new things.”

Again, I had nothing. Trust me – I would’ve loved to have either of those things, but my semester just didn’t shake out that way.

“Come on, at least tell me you presented at a conference or to the EECS department at large.”

What would I have told them? That my experiments didn’t work? That the effect I investigated is likely not experimentally realizable?

“So what exactly did you accomplish then? You know this question is required, right? Whatever, just make up some other thing.”

Of course, this was not a real conversation with a person at MIT, but rather me filling out a particular section of the semesterly UROP evaluation form. And so, with the same regret I’ve felt the previous semester, I checked the “Other” box and moved on to the rest of the form.

What is a UROP anyway?

A UROP  – Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program – allows MIT undergrads like me to collaborate with renowned MIT faculty on cutting-edge research. Typically, a student would find a lab studying an area of interest and work on a project alongside a grad student or postdoc while the UROP office or the lab funds their research.

UROPs are wildly popular, with 92% of undergrads doing one at some point. Understandably so – students gain technical expertise and research experience while labs benefit from the (effectively free) labour of highly-motivated undergrads; overall, a win-win situation for everyone involved. Additionally, many UROP projects sound extremely cool – who wouldn’t want to work on laser-induced mind control at MIT?

But probably the most enticing part of doing a UROP (at least for me) is the prospect of applying the skills I learned in classes to create a tangible product. Did you know that Collier Memorial outside the Stata Center was designed and built, in part, by UROP students? And that iRobot⁠03 The company that makes Roombas. was partially the product of a successful UROP experience? And just a few days ago, Kathleen ‘23 had her research published in Nature and featured in MIT News!

Unfortunately, my UROP experiences thus far have not been nearly as successful as the ones listed above. I’ve been with my current lab for the past two semesters. In the fall, I fabricated magnetic memory devices using two exciting new materials, only to discover that they didn’t work because the crystal structures were incompatible. And in the spring, I tried to simulate a hypothetical physical effect that never emerged in the dozens of experiments I tried over the semester.

And it feels a bit disappointing

At MIT, I’m surrounded by incredibly successful people with incredibly successful research projects. I know students who discovered a major security flaw in Apple’s content recognition system as part of an MIT class project and presented their findings at CVPR⁠04 The world’s largest conference in computer vision. . Some of my peers have even published research while they were in high school! And not to mention those professors with scientific results named after them while they were still undergrads.

These people pour enormous amounts of effort into their work and don’t go around boasting about their successes⁠05 Obviously, there are exceptions, but this is true for almost all of MIT. . However, I still see news articles about MIT students discovering remarkable new technologies every other day. I deeply admire these people and strive to work as hard as them… yet sometimes I can’t help but wonder – what are they doing right that I’m doing wrong? Why do so many people have posters, publications, and/or patents to showcase their UROP work while I only have experiments that don’t work? Am I just bad at doing research?

In some ways, the answer to that last question could be “yes”. I initially struggled to understand things in the lab because I started the UROP without knowing any quantum mechanics, and I didn’t spend as much time in the lab as I should have because I was overcommitted in the past two semesters. Because of that, I worry about how those around me, like my UROP mentor, my lab’s PI, and my peers, would judge me. With MIT providing me with such amazing resources and guidance, I was afraid of being seen as incompetent; unable to get any of my experiments to work.

My insecurities are amplified further by the UROP evaluation form and a few people at MIT I’ve interacted with who make it seem like getting publishable results out of UROPs is the norm. “Oh, just publish a few good papers in your field.”, I recall one professor commenting when I asked about graduate school admissions, “That shouldn’t be too hard for an MIT student like you.”

Sometimes, I feel like I’m also a part of this problem. As an associate advisor⁠06 A student who provides academic support and resources to first-year students. , I’ve given talks to bright-eyed first-year students about how to make the most out of a UROP. While I lectured about the importance of being proactive and a creative problem solver, I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I often failed to follow my own advice.

But that’s just how a lot of UROPs go

Upon further reflection and talking with some of my professors from this semester, I’ve realized that my research experience is surprisingly common across the undergrad population. It still kind of sucks that I didn’t quite advance humanity’s scientific knowledge as I’d hoped, but I feel considerably less bad about it now.

Firstly, most students who do UROPs do not get to publish their results either; the stuff I see in the news is the cream of the crop in undergrad research. After all, the publication process is long and arduous, as I learned in my communication-intensive classes this semester, so huge kudos to all my peers who have published before. (The numbers reflect this too – MIT publishes fewer than 2000 science papers annually, with grad students and professors accounting for the vast majority of MIT’s academic output.) All this to say that getting a publication out of a UROP, especially at my level, is probably not a realistic goal to set in the first place.

The publication process, as described by a professor in 6.2600 (micro/nano processing tech).

Secondly, it’s okay if things don’t initially work in research. When I showed my results from this past semester to my UROP mentor and PI, they were unexpectedly pleased with my work even though my simulations hadn’t worked as I’d hoped. As they explained, the insights we gain from knowing what doesn’t work are just as important as knowing what does. For example, my simulations taught them to avoid using permalloy⁠07 The magnetic material I was using in my simulations. in their real-world experiments. The nanofabrication class I’ve previously written about did a great job of teaching me this lesson. In preparing us for research in microelectronics, it’s one of the very few classes at MIT where the final project doesn’t have to work to be considered successful. Although having a functional end product was satisfying, I learned much more from messing up intermediate steps and then reflecting on what went wrong.

(As an aside, I think it’s rather unfortunate that researchers don’t publicize their experiments that didn’t work, because others will ultimately try those same experiments and obtain the same results.)

But most importantly, I still managed to achieve my main goal for the research experience – to learn about nanofabrication and magnetic computing devices. Sure, travelling to conferences and publishing a paper would’ve been nice, but I believe the whole point for many UROPs at MIT is to learn research techniques outside of classes and gain exposure to exciting new fields. (And plus, I still have at least four more semesters left at MIT to get something to work!)

A happy ending after all

I must confess that up until now, I’ve been slightly misleading about the UROP evaluation form. The part I showed in the introduction was the only part of the form I disagreed with; the rest contained valuable questions to help me reflect on my experience and plan for future semesters. For example, the evaluation form emphasizes the importance of setting goals and expectations at the beginning of a project, which I’ve found immensely helpful for planning this past semester’s project.

Although the results of the past two semesters have been somewhat disappointing, I think it’s good to experience disappointment this early in my career before I start doing research full-time. Thanks to my UROP experiences, I now have much more realistic expectations about academia. I also learned a lot about what kind of work I want to do in the future; for example, although computational work allows me to get results much more easily and quickly, I still find experimental work more interesting.

Despite the disillusionment that often comes along with them, I find that UROPs really do live up to their names – opportunities for undergrads like me to do research, not only on cutting-edge technology but also about their personal preferences.

Day 7

It was the day before the big concert; naturally, the entire afternoon was blocked out for a dress rehearsal. Still, we had one more excursion at the Cultural Centre of the Peoples of the Amazon before then.

At the Cultural Center, we met Djuena Tikuna (the indigenous singer who was to perform with us) and her husband in person for the first time. Our cast of performers was finally complete! Djuena then taught us the lyrics to a song in the Ticuna language about saving the rainforest; we would perform an arrangement of that song in our concert the next day!

While we sang with Djuena, her husband accompanied us on indigenous percussion (such as a washboard-like instrument made from caiman skin). One of the instruments was particularly fascinating – by blowing it through his nose, he somehow made a sci-fi laser sound effect (apparently to mimic some kind of bird call). Fun fact: his teacher was actually Eliberto Barroncas – the instrument maker we met on day 5.

I felt like a celebrity when I saw this poster outside the Teatro Amazonas.

We spent the rest of the day rehearsing in the Teatro Amazonas. Unfortunately, we ran over time so often that we ended up behind schedule by about an hour. The rehearsal stretched on for so long that we didn’t get to rehearse one of our pieces. Fred was visibly distressed (which also made us sad), so a few MITWE members tried to get Ken Amis (our assistant conductor who wasn’t on the trip with us) on the phone to help calm Fred’s nerves.

Fred picture of the day.

Day 8

Finally, the big day arrived. I could feel the excitement bubbling in the air as I lined up in the hotel lobby to receive a Brazilian tattoo… temporary, of course, and sanctioned by MIT⁠08 Well, mostly just Fred, but what’s the difference? . These tattoos were made with genipapo – a dark blue dye also used to colour food, like edible henna. (I forgot to mention this in the previous blog post, but Fred had also decided two days prior that we should perform in the black t-shirts⁠09 The t-shirts had the same design as the poster above. I thought they looked really groovy. we received as part of the trip. The t-shirts did make us look more cohesive, but the women who brought floor-length dresses for the concert were less than pleased.)

A slice of genipapo toast. (And no, this was not the slice that made me almost miss a piece during the concert.)

Despite the previous day’s technical difficulties, the concert was an overwhelming success! We even managed to set up an impromptu live stream of the event on someone’s phone, which you can watch on MITWE’s Facebook page. (However, I did almost miss one of the pieces I was performing in because I was too engrossed in eating a slice of genipapo toast in the dressing room to notice everyone leaving to go on stage. But Fred doesn’t need to know that .) Afterwards, there were even fireworks outside; I know they’re almost certainly unrelated to our concert, but I like to think they were for us anyway.

Fred picture of the day.

And with the concert done and dusted, it was time to head back to Cambridge and continue our MIT lives. What a way to end my spring break! As I ate brunch back at Simmons Hall and thought about how grateful I was for eating vegetables and not fish for the first time in a week, I also thought about how lucky I was to be a part of MIT’s thriving arts scene.

When I first came to MIT, I thought I’d have to give up my identity of being a musician in favour of becoming the stereotypical MIT engineer, with all work and no play. But then I discovered MITWE, and there was music in my life once more.

Through MITWE, I can play music from around the world in a large ensemble, allowing me to continue honing my clarinet skills and developing my musicality. And I even get six units of HASS-A⁠10 The arts component of MIT's humanities requirement credit and an iPad Pro on top of that!

Of course, most MITWE musicians are not there just for academic credit (although it is a very nice bonus); instead, most people are there because they’re passionate about music and sharing their passion with others. When Fred asked us out of the blue to spend a day performing in a concert hall an hour away from MIT, a dozen of us chose to go with him even though we could’ve easily stayed home and worked on psets instead. Because of this amazing community, some alumni continue playing in the ensemble for years after graduating. (Scott, MITWE’s historian, has been involved for over 20 years!)

But the glue that holds this all together is undeniably Fred Harris, our wonderful conductor. Although I’ve only been at MIT for two years and haven’t witnessed his true power, several senior faculty members have described him and his projects, such as the time he brought Jacob Collier to MIT, as pure genius to me. Not only does he work tirelessly to ensure everything runs smoothly, but he’s also genuinely invested in every MITWE member’s well-being, with our semesterly “playing exam” doubling as an opportunity for him to check on how we’re doing during the most stressful time of the semester.

To any incoming first-year student who plays percussion/a wind instrument and wants to be a part of this once-in-a-lifetime experience at MIT, I highly recommend auditioning for MITWE. It has been one of the most defining parts of my MIT journey thus far (and I’m sure Fred would appreciate having bassoons after not having any this year).

Day 4

A top-down shot of the rainforest. I’d never held onto my phone so tightly before taking this photo.

Day 4 was the highlight of my trip because we did so many awesome activities that day. Our first stop was the Museu da Amazônia (MUSA for short), where we got to hike around in the thickets of the rainforest. At MUSA, we were split into several different tour groups; my group started at the main attraction – a 42-meter-tall observation tower looming above the rainforest canopy.

The view from there was breathtaking, with trees as far as the eye could see. However, we couldn’t stay up there for long – it was also scorching hot, and a few of us even pulled out our umbrellas to shield ourselves from the sun.

An (honestly kind of bad) panorama of the rainforest I took from the observation tower.

The things we saw back on the ground certainly didn’t disappoint either. Our guide, a zoologist with an extremely keen eye, could spot even the tiniest, most well-camouflaged critters among the leaves. At one point, he even casually scooped up a snake from the ground while we walked!

Some kind of stick insect on a tree.

A little snake that our guide just casually scooped up from the ground.

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“Guys, smell the snake!” he told us. So I smelled it. It smelled awful. Not sure what I was expecting, honestly.

The rest of the special exhibits (giant sloth/crocodile skeletons, giant fish, and giant water lilies) flew by quickly. That is until we got to the arachnids exhibit (finally, some small things!). Did you know that arachnids make up 10% of all arthropods in the rainforest? Or that adult scorpions glow bright cyan under UV light? I certainly did at the end of our tour because our zoologist was really into arachnids. Like really, really into arachnids. So much so that we spent more than an hour at that exhibit.

(Though, it was interesting to learn that baby scorpions don’t glow under UV light because they don’t produce the necessary fluorescent protein.)

Surprisingly, we weren’t the last group to finish, even though we spent what seemed like an eternity staring at tarantulas. (It turned out that one of the other groups all decided to get fruit juice at some random juice bar in the middle of their tour.) While we waited, I read some local myths they had posted around the place. My favourite was the story of “Devil with No Ass”, which… is certainly one way of explaining why we have electric eels.

That evening, we finally saw the famous Teatro Amazonas in person. When Fred told us the theatre would be pink, I imagined a muted pink that blends in with the background; I would never have imagined it to be bright, Barbie-dream-house pink instead.

Barbie Dream (Opera) House.

In the theatre, we listened to a thrilling jazz concert performed by our own FJE and a local jazz ensemble. It was incredible how well the two groups played together despite not speaking the same language. I later learned that FJE only found out they’d be performing a few hours before the concert, but I never would’ve guessed.

And the cherry on top? For dinner, we went to a restaurant that served us 15 different types of pizza, each with a distinct Brazilian twist. (Unfortunately, this included a cupuaçu dessert pizza, but I suppose you can’t win them all.)

Not sure which pizza Fred is eating in this gif.

Day 5

After FJE’s performance the previous evening, everyone in MITWE was itching to play some music as a group too. Luckily for us, the first activity of the fifth day was meeting and improvising with indigenous percussionist and instrument maker Eliberto Barroncas.

It was quite amazing how Eliberto’s instruments (all made from natural materials he harvested himself or reused plastic) sounded uncannily like the rainforest itself; we later learned that those instruments were originally used for hunting and made to mimic animal noises.

For dinner, we went to another “floating restaurant”⁠11 Is an airplane a floating restaurant? Is a pop tart a ravioli? We got into some heated debates about these questions; drop your best arguments in the comments below. (i.e. restaurant on a boat), this time with live jazz performed by a group of musicians who performed with FJE the previous day. I ordered “ribs”, but was served fish ribs instead, which just about ruined the whole trip for me.

(Just kidding, the fish ribs actually tasted decent, against all my expectations about fish.)

Day 6

Day 6’s main activity was touring the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) – Brazil’s premier institute for rainforest research. First, we listened to a few talks by VJE’s Talia K. and two of INPA’s scientists. I was surprised to learn about their research facilities there, including a cleanroom (akin to MIT.nano) and a 325-meter-tall observation tower (taller than the Eiffel Tower), all in the middle of the rainforest!

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We then took a campus tour and saw all sorts of exotic plants and animals, including an albino turtle and a sloth eating cacao! (No birds, unfortunately; apparently none of their favourite fruits was in season yet.)

They even had manatees there! “Manatee” in Portuguese is “peixe-boi” (literally “fish cow”), but it’s pronounced almost like “pastry boy”. So when I heard Talia excitedly refer to them in Portuguese, I initially thought she was comparing them to the Pillsbury Doughboy because of their rotund bodies.

Just before lunch, there were a few more talks. First, we watched the winning entry to the 2023 Dance Your PhD competition in the biology category, which was filmed at INPA. Next, some of MITWE/FJE’s own gave presentations – Axel V. (on engineering anti-CRISPR variants), Rachel M. (on a CubeSat she recently launched), and Scott S. (on the science of disaster movies).

I was still pretty excited about seeing a sloth up close earlier that day, so when they let us choose between seeing reptiles/amphibians and a science museum they had on campus, I chose the former option without hesitation.

Unfortunately, they failed to mention that the animals wouldn’t necessarily be alive.

At least the snakes look pretty I guess?

As soon as I stepped foot into the reptiles/amphibians room, I was hit with the stench of death. Indeed, every single reptile and amphibian in that room was suspended in formaldehyde and other nasty chemicals. I still don’t understand how the researchers there can stand working in that room all day, but kudos to them for doing so.

We had a few hours of free time back at the hotel, so I went to a nearby mall to try some fresh açai (which everyone had been recommending). That decision was by far my best decision of the day. The açai was delicious (and tasted much better than the açai in the US), and the mall also had a mini rainforest in the center. I even got a Brazilian Happy Meal at the end of the excursion!

I promise there's açai somewhere under all those toppings.

I took this picture from inside the mall!

The Happy Meal definitely lived up to its name.

(Plus the toys that were inside.)

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We’re just two days away from the big concert at the end of the trip! Stick around for the third and final part of the Fredventure, which I’ll post (hopefully) next week.

“Guess what, gang?” Fred Harris – the director of the MIT Wind Ensemble (MITWE) – announced one day during our regular Wednesday rehearsal, “We’re going to Brazil!”

Suddenly, samba music began blasting from a dozen speakers hidden around Kresge auditorium while the stage transformed into an impromptu dance floor. That Friday, we performed in the famous Teatro Amazonas in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

How it went down in my head.

… well, maybe that’s not exactly how it all happened, but it sure felt that way. The whole experience was so incredible that I still can’t quite comprehend how it was all orchestrated (pun intended).

It all started in my first-year fall semester when we performed our first Hearing Amazônia concert. It was a massive three-way collaboration between MITWE, the Festival Jazz Ensemble (FJE), and the Vocal Jazz Ensemble (VJE), starring seven(!) guest artists and three guest speakers. At the time, I thought it would be a one-time event because of the sheer scale and effort of coordinating it all. Plus, I was unaware of any connection between MITWE and Brazil, so I assumed we performed Brazilian music because it sounded fresh and funky⁠12 It really does .

Little did I know that the concert (and many more future events) were already in the works for several years. In fact, the trip to Brazil would likely have happened in 2020 if COVID hadn’t appeared and disrupted everything. Thanks to Fred’s commitment to environmentalism and music education, he moved heaven and earth behind the scenes to forge a meaningful connection between MIT and communities in the Amazon rainforest.

For the rest of my first year, references to Brazil were scattered across our rehearsals and performances. At the end of that fall semester, we read through a set of traditional Brazilian music arranged for the wind ensemble by some Swiss music students; the following spring, we performed those pieces in a concert. Finally, in my second-year fall semester, the big announcement was made – we were going on an all-expenses-paid trip to Brazil to learn about their local music and perform in a concert!

Day 1

Fast forward to about three weeks ago, and we’ve arrived in Manaus – a Brazilian city in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. What a way to start my spring break! Immediately upon landing, I could tell that Manaus was a very cool place (but not literally – it was 30°C⁠13 86°F outside). Thanks to the city’s latitude and the time of year, objects outside cast virtually no shadows when the sun was directly overhead. Unfortunately, I had very little bandwidth to marvel at this phenomenon because I’d failed to get enough sleep (and food) on the two flights it took to get to Manaus, but lunch was awaiting us at the hotel when we arrived.

Check out these extra long pineapples.

I thoroughly enjoyed eating Brazilian food. The cheese bread and filet mignon (which was somehow available at almost every meal) were superb, and the pineapples in MIT dining halls wouldn’t be as sweet as the Brazilian ones, even if I dumped a spoonful of sugar onto them.

After trying (fruitlessly) to nap, I went to a nearby supermarket with a few other MITWE members to buy bottled water (since we were advised not to drink the tap water). We also decided to try some local ice cream flavours there – an excellent decision for everyone except one of the percussionists, who accidentally bought a giant block of plain ice instead.

For dinner, we went to Luar de Uaicurapá – a nightclub-esque restaurant famous for live Boi-Bumbá music. Unfortunately, some wires must’ve crossed somewhere because the restaurant ran out of food for us, so we had to return to the hotel two hours earlier than planned. (But at least that meant I could sleep longer that night.)

Fred picture of the day.

Day 2

An x-caboquinho.

At breakfast, I was greeted by yet more delicious Brazilian food – tapioca crepes, locally-made cheese, and a peculiar sandwich named “x-caboquinho”, made using fruit with the texture of dried mango and the taste of avocado. (It was also during breakfast when I learned that the letter “x” is pronounced “cheese” in Portuguese.)

The day’s main activity was visiting the São Sebastião community (an indigenous community that I think works with MIT). To get there, we took a boat ride up the Rio Negro – one of the two rivers that run through Manaus.

At the community, the locals welcomed us with open arms and performed some dances they’d prepared for us. We then learned about their robotics projects for protecting the rainforest, from building rafts for measuring river pH levels to teaching kids how to fly drones to identify illegal deforestation. Most of those projects were possible thanks to the Nobre Academia De Robótica – a local startup aiming to help indigenous communities through robotics education. I couldn’t help but marvel at the powerful drones they had there; one even had VR capabilities!

The locals also offered us a selection of home-grown fruit, ranging from fresh Brazil nuts to rambutan (which I found very surprising because I’d previously only ever seen it in East Asia). “Wow!” I thought, “ Ananda⁠14 One of my MIT friends from Brazil was right – all the fruits here are amazing!”. However, Ananda was wrong – meet cupuaçu.

More like cupuASSu.

A cousin of cacao, cupuaçu is a very popular fruit in Northern Brazil. But don’t let its innocent looks deceive you! Almost every dessert we ate in Manaus contained it in some form… which was kind of a problem for us because it tasted like raw fish soaked in kerosene. (I could probably write an entire blog post about how much I despise cupuaçu, but I’ll focus on the positives of the trip instead.)

Fred wading into water.

After the sky cleared, we walked along the river bank, where we saw some kids doing backflips off tall trees into the river. Apparently, this inspired a group (including Fred) so much that they waded into the river to try to join the kids.

At night, there was a dress rehearsal for an upcoming festival in the city, and we were encouraged to attend. In true MIT fashion, however, I elected to stay back at the hotel and write my thermodynamics lab report. I certainly appreciated the extra few hours of sleep, but admittedly I somewhat regret not seeing a blue Coca-Cola advertisement in person.

Fred picture of the day.

Day 3

We started off the third day by visiting a museum about the history of Manaus. It was interesting to learn about the local history (especially after taking 21L.019⁠15 Introduction to European and Latin-American Fiction ); however, the most fun part of the experience was when Fred tried to sneak off into the city alone. And he would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling kids responsible tour guides!

Next, we went to a market in the middle of the city. Some vendors offered some… rather interesting items (“all natural Amazonian Viagra – made from guaraná!” one sign read), although I was drawn more toward the handmade musical instruments they had on display. Specifically, they had an assortment of wooden slide whistles and recorders. I quickly discovered that the recorders had similar fingerings to a clarinet, so I played a few snippets from our more classical repertoire, much to the amusement of the others on the trip.

For lunch, we went to a “floating restaurant” (basically a restaurant on a boat) where we could see monkeys, iguanas, and giant water lilies. On the way, we passed the Meeting of the Waters – a natural phenomenon where the Rio Negro and Rio Amazonas meet but don’t mix for 6 kilometres⁠16 Almost 4 miles . The views from the water don’t do it justice because we couldn’t see very far on our boats, but aerial images showed me just how striking it is.

An aerial view of the meeting of the waters (not my picture).

Nevertheless, there were still advantages to being on the water – we saw dolphins in the river!

We only saw the regular grey dolphins, but there are also pink ones like this in the river. However, they’re extremely rare.

As we ate lunch, a storm was brewing overhead. We didn’t pay too much attention to it, but a heavy rain pour broke out just as we were about to leave, stranding us for an hour! Being musicians, however, we all decided to pass the time by singing the songs in our upcoming concert. Before long, the storm passed, and we were back at the hotel.

Fred picture of the day.

In the blink of an eye, the first third of the trip was over already. But the real Fredventure is just getting started! Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, featuring:

• A tour of the rainforest.
• Indigenous instruments and rhythms.
• More Fred shenanigans.
• The science of disaster films.
• And why you should join MITWE too ( especially if you play the bassoon⁠17 Please, we are desperate )!

Before coming to college, I often wondered how hard MIT was. Conversations with current students led me to believe that MIT’s hardness ranged from “quite” to “extraordinarily”; some even described it as “pretty damn hard”. However, these conversations always lacked the one thing my inner engineer craved most – numbers.

Without objective measurements backing up these results, how could I trust their accuracy, let alone use them in future experiments? Which hardness scale do these results even refer to? And don’t even get me started on the lack of units. I shudder as I think of all the unsuspecting high-school students making important life decisions based on this questionable data. And to think that MIT calls itself an engineering school!

Luckily, all that is about to change. Thanks to MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), I have the perfect tools to conduct a quantitative analysis of MIT’s hardness.

Background

But first, let me address a question that’s undoubtedly burning in your mind right now – what exactly is hardness?

Merriam-Webster defines hardness as “the cohesion of the particles on the surface of a mineral as determined by its capacity to scratch another or be itself scratched” [1]. In simpler terms, harder materials are more difficult to scratch and dent.

There are several different scales used to quantify hardness. The most well-known is the Mohs hardness scale – an ordinal scale ranging from 1 (talc) to 10 (diamond) where material X ranks above material Y if X can scratch Y [2].

Figure 1 – Mohs hardness scale for some common materials [2].

Figure 2 – Schematic of the Vickers hardness test [5].

Materials and Methods

I asked several MIT students about what they believe makes MIT hard. From this survey, I concluded that the chief contributing factor to MIT’s hardness is its notoriously rigorous schoolwork. I further broke down this schoolwork into four subcategories:

1. Homework assignments (also known as “psets”).
2. Exams.
3. Lab assignments and design projects.
4. Majors as a whole.

Based on these four subcategories, I collected five different samples to test:

1. My 3.020 (thermodynamics of materials) psets from this semester.
2. My 6.1220 (design and analysis of algorithms) midterm exam from last semester.
3. The 6.1910 (computation structures) design project from spring 2009.
4. A stack of sticky notes I received from the Department of Chemical Engineering.
5. A plastic highlighter I received from the Department of Chemistry.

Figure 3 – The samples I used, arranged left to right.

To test these samples, I used a Vickers indenter (generously provided by the DMSE in their all-new “Breakerspace” opening in July) to measure their Vickers hardnesses. To correct for human error, I took three measurements for each sample using the indenter and used the average as my final reported measurement.

Figure 4 – The Vickers indenter with a sample loaded.

I then used ad-hoc tests such as Mohs hardness tests to confirm my results.

Results and Discussion

First, I tested my 3.020 psets. Thermodynamics is one of the most challenging classes I’ve taken so far at MIT because of how unintuitive the concepts are, and the homework certainly reflects that… but exactly how hard are the psets?

Immediately after I loaded the sample into the Vickers indenter and pressed “measure” to find out, I encountered my first problem – no indentation was visible, even after repeated measurements! This result meant one of two possibilities:

1. The sample was harder than a diamond…
2. Or it was so soft that all indentations sprang back (like a flat marshmallow).

Figure 6 – No visible indentation.

I then bent the psets without them shattering, meaning they were ductile. This result suggests that the second possibility is the most likely. For now, though, I left my lab notebook blank.

Next, I tested my 6.1220 midterm exam. The median score for this exam was 61 out of 120 – by all measures, the most difficult exam I’ve taken so far at MIT… but all that is irrelevant when measuring material hardness. Once again, however, the results from the indenter were inconclusive.

At this point, I was rather desperate to get some numerical data, so I attributed these disappointing results to the fact that 6.1220 dealt with software. Surely, I asked myself, the 6.1910 design project – a project centred around designing efficient hardware – would yield better results?

Unsurprisingly, the design project (along with the chemical engineering sticky notes) sprang back like marshmallows.

Could this be why there have been no previous quantitative studies on MIT’s hardness? Is the measurement process simply too complex for a silly little undergraduate like me to perform? I considered giving up here, but I still had one remaining sample to measure, so I pressed onward.

As I pressed “measure”, I held my breath and crossed my fingers. As the microscope slowly focused on the sample, the impossible happened – a faint impression of a square appeared on the computer screen. I could finally extract a numerical measurement!

Figure 7 – A visible indentation at last.

I then made two more measurements and extracted a hardness value of 194 HV for the highlighter. This value is roughly the hardness of polypropylene [4] (which makes sense if you think about it).

In my excitement, I gripped hard on the stack of previous samples I was holding. To my surprise and delight, my fingernails scratched them, which reminded me of another tool I had at my disposal – the Mohs hardness scale!

Knowing this, I grabbed a nearby pencil and piece of chalk and measured 1.5 on the Mohs hardness scale for all four samples. These values correspond to roughly 20 HV – an order of magnitude off from the highlighter’s hardness value, though that data point might be an outlier.

Conclusion

MIT, with a median Vickers hardness value of about 20 HV, is about as hard as paper. In other words, not very hard at all.

Figure 8 – MIT vs. other materials on the Vickers hardness scale. Note that this is plotted on a log scale.

All numbers presented in this blog post are rough estimates, so take them with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, this post is a big step in the right direction, and the findings presented here will open the door for future studies about the hardnesses of different colleges.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Dr Meri Treska for letting me use the DMSE Breakerspace’s equipment. I’d also like to thank you, the reader, for making it this far in this blog post.

References

[1] Merriam-Webster. Hardness. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hardness. March 2023.

[2] National Park Service. Mohs Hardness Scale. https://www.nps.gov/articles/mohs-hardness-scale.htm. January 2023.

[3] Encyclopedia Britannica. Vickers hardness. https://www.britannica.com/science/Vickers-hardness. December 2018.

[4] Marlin Steel. Polypropylene material properties. https://www.marlinwire.com/blog/7-need-to-know-polypropylene-material-properties. January 2020.

[5] NextGen Material Testing. Understanding the Basics of the Vickers Hardness Test. https://www.nextgentest.com/blog/understanding-the-basics-of-the-vickers-hardness. September 2019.

He was a sweet boy who loved food, sleeping in the dirt, and sunbathing. Sadly, he passed away shortly after I moved to MIT. I was devastated, but luckily, I still have many pictures to remind me of him. This semester, I was fortunate enough to take a class at MIT.nano where I immortalized one of those pictures as a solar cell!

(The cat to the right is a random cat I found online.)

The inspiration

MIT.nano is MIT’s state-of-the-art research facility for nanoscale science and engineering. Built near the end of 2018, it houses the most sophisticated nanofabrication facilities of any university in the world. At the heart of it is a cleanroom with a vast array of advanced (and expensive) machinery used to control and measure material properties down to the nanometer – that’s a billionth of a meter!

Since MIT.nano’s inception, researchers have used the space for all kinds of high-tech research, from paper-thin loudspeakers to new drugs to treat cancer. Almost everything created there is super exciting, so naturally, the MIT.nano staff want students to get excited about it too.

To that end, undergraduates like me get to take classes where we work in the cleanroom to design and fabricate our own nanotechnology. These classes range from 3-hour-long “etch a tiny image onto silicon” seminars (designed to show off the facilities) to semester-long courses where students create novel microelectronic devices using MIT.nano’s equipment.

This wafer contains everyone’s submitted pictures from this past IAP’s seminars.

I’m taking one of those classes this semester – 3.155J/6.2600J (micro/nano processing technologies). In lectures, we learn about semiconductors and nanofabrication techniques; in labs, we apply that knowledge and make devices like microfluidic chips, thin-film transistors, and eventually a device that we design.

Without a doubt, 6.2600 is the most magical and exciting class I’ve taken at MIT – and it has only been four weeks! The lectures are fun and engaging⁠18 Shoutout to Jorg’s top-tier memes and Jesús’s wholesome efforts to learn everyone’s name. , the class policies are fair⁠19 We get extra late hours whenever the course staff take too long to grade our homework. , and students can augment lab assignments with their own designs if they put in some extra work.

Our first lab project is fabricating solar cells from scratch, which involves testing fifteen different designs to see which is the most efficient:

Each silicon wafer can fit 25 solar cells, so we had space left for other designs. The original plan was for students to submit pictures to be etched inside those extra spaces as decorations, but I felt more ambitious – I wanted to take a picture and turn it into a full-on solar cell.

Creating the design

Jorg, the lecturer in charge of our labs, was totally on board with my plan. The only problems were that they had never done something like that before, and I only had two days before the lab to pull it off. Luckily, I had taken one of the IAP seminars a few weeks earlier, so I had a vague notion of how it would work.

The main idea was to use different-sized squares to represent the brightness of each pixel, with large squares being brighter in the final image. It’s pretty much the opposite of halftone dots used to print old newspapers.

I wanted to expose as much silicon as possible to the sunlight (so the solar cell would be decently efficient), so I also needed to squash the image’s dynamic range⁠20 The difference between the lightest and darkest parts of the image. in half. The resulting images didn’t look too great, but at least they were still recognizable.

Finally, I needed to connect everything to collect the generated electric current. I initially coded something complicated to minimize the amount of excess metal, but after some back-and-forth emailing with Jorg, I settled on simple vertical stripes to collect the current instead.

This was the final result:

Fabricating the solar cell

Day 1

Gowning up to enter the cleanroom.

Using hydrofluoric acid (the same stuff Walter White used to dissolve bodies in Breaking Bad) to etch the wafer after patterning.

The results of day 1.

Day 2

Rinse (with acid) and repeat.

Day 3

All the solar cells together.

How effective was the final product?

The electrical testing results from day 3 for Catsby’s solar cell.

My four custom solar cells actually ended up performing surprisingly well.

In particular, the Catsby solar cell achieved an efficiency of 7.7%! For reference, the best-performing of the fifteen solar cells we tested had an efficiency of 9.3%.

Out of the four custom solar cells I made, the one with Catsby’s image was also the second most-efficient cell, with the Megamind solar cell narrowly beating it by 0.3% in efficiency.

Of course, these numbers pale in comparison to the best solar cells available today, with some designs achieving efficiencies of over 45%. Despite these high efficiencies though, none of them contain images of Catsby, so we all know who the real winner is here.

For your enjoyment, here are more pictures of my little ray of sunshine to brighten your day:

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It all started seven years ago with that book by SASOL⁠21 South African Synthetic Oil .

Oh, how innocent it looks…

“Come on, dude, just try some. All the smart kids are reading it.”

Initially, I knew better than to trust a book written by a gas company. I tried holding out, but I was young and wanted to fit in, so peer pressure eventually made me cave in.

“Okay, fine! … but just one page.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and flipped to a random page. Little did I know that as soon as my eyes opened and fell upon the words “Columba livia”, my life would change forever.

People say that this type of media, a nonfiction book, doesn’t get you hooked as the others do – that it doesn’t tell stories quite as compelling as blockbusters or books about wizards. I knew countless people who ventured into the Marvel Cinematic Universe or even, heavens forbid, the MIT Admissions Blogs, but cases of nonfiction books having the same effect were few and far between.

I thought I was safe, so I let my guard down, but I was more susceptible to the book’s contents than I thought. Immediately, I felt my eyes drawn to the colorful illustrations of the common feral pigeon on the page. I’d never realized the brown, red, gray, and white pigeons⁠22 Not to mention all the in-between cookies-and-cream patterns. flocking together on city streets come from the same species. Nor had I ever paid enough attention to them to notice their iridescent green and purple feathers. Their perfectly rotund bodies. Their deep, rolling coos…

An egg-ceptionally gorgeous ash-red pigeon in snow.

One page turned into a chapter, then two, then ten. In the blink of an eye, an hour had passed. Even after stepping away from the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about pigeons. My first instinct when seeing a flock would be to pull out my phone and snap a picture. I learned how to identify them based on their coos alone; for some, even their wing-flapping sounds! All this so I could spot rare pigeons as quickly as possible. (It certainly didn’t help that these birds were everywhere.)

With every passing week, I craved more knowledge about these delightful birds. Before long, I’d moved past the book and onto National Geographic documentaries. I thought they’d surely answer all my lingering questions about pigeons, but they only raised even more questions. How can something the shape and size of a large potato fly at 150 km/h?⁠23 Apparently they're just very muscular and aerodynamic. Plus some separation anxiety when pigeon racing. Why and how do some species make whistling noises when they flap their wings?⁠24 Some species have special wing feathers that vibrate to warn surrounding birds about imminent danger. And how can they always navigate home without Google Maps?⁠25 They have magnetite in their bodies that they use as compasses.

It wasn’t just their physical abilities that fascinated me, either. I was intrigued by their social behaviors and the way they interacted with each other and with humans. I learned that they’re incredibly loyal to their partners. I observed how they’d share food, even if it meant going hungry themselves. And I marveled at their intelligence, their ability to recognize human faces and even understand basic commands.

A clever pigeon at the coo-mputer.

I thought that going to MIT would force me to quit my pigeon obsession; after all, only two species of pigeons live in Massachusetts. But with so many tall buildings and New York City within driving distance, this proved quite the opposite. My camera roll continued to grow with zoomed-in pictures of fat pigeons sitting on high ledges, and I joined a pigeon-themed lounge in Simmons. Even the first thing I made using CAD⁠26 Computer-aided design. software at MIT was a (somewhat misproportioned but still charming) pigeon.

Of course, these activities didn’t go unnoticed by those around me. I started receiving pigeon-themed gifts from my friends for my birthdays and Christmas – plush toys, 3D-printed figurines, and even an inflatable mascot! And even outside my friend group, my reputation precedes me – a few days ago, a freshman I knew forgot my name and referred to me as “pigeon man” instead!

A small subset of the pigeon-themed items in my room.

My friend Richard's final project for How To Make Almost Anything.

Chalk art of a pigeon above my bed. I have received many comments about this over Zoom calls.

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Nikola Tesla would surely be proud.